


Months

by rilenite



Series: Dungeons and Dragons Writing [1]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Genre: Gen, Isolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-27
Updated: 2017-11-27
Packaged: 2019-02-07 12:41:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12841398
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rilenite/pseuds/rilenite
Summary: Nine months in a magic jail cell really takes a toll on you.[AKA: I wrote a fic for an NPC from my DnD campaign.]





	Months

**Month One.**

 

He shouldn’t have ignored her warning. He knew they weren’t prepared enough to attack an Acolyte city, but by Nihil he knew he had to try. He had to be ambitious, something she just didn’t seem to want to be. Besides, her stepping down from the attack worked out well for him, she was out free and could get him. Eventually. It would probably be a few months until the little Drow would sneak into the jail and get him out, which, that would be fine. He could wait, patience was one of the few virtues he could claim to have.

So he made himself at home. The cell was small but comfortable, and Ornstein, one of his accomplices in the attack, was in the cell across from him. The two made their own fun, openly poking fun at the guards who barely held their unaffected facade’s as the two criticized every fiber of their being. The jokes always stopped when the guards threatened to send them away to Rella, but resumed only a few days after the threat was issued and nothing ever came of it.

All in all, it was bearable, the food was absolute garbage that appeared in their cell by magic every day, and the cell was small, but things could have been worse. He wasn’t dead or being tortured, so at the end of the day that was a positive.

 

**Month Two.**

 

By the Gods, he hadn’t expected it to be so damn boring. After one particularly harsh jab from Ornstein to one of the guards he’d finally been moved to a cell farther down the block, and the one across from Karmenos sat empty for quite some time. He’d laughed at first when the guards thought moving Ornstein would be a solution, but that laughter soon faded when he realized they planned on keeping everyone away from him.

He’d never really called himself a social creature growing up, he was kind to people when he needed to be, but he hadn’t felt the need to hang around people at all times. But now, with a total absence of another being he realized just how much he thrived on being social. He tried to speak to the guards, but without the second person jeering at them he couldn’t seem to get a rise out of them. Eventually he began simply trying to have friendly conversations with them, but that proved to be impossible as well.

And so he began simply sitting in his room, eyes closed, and opening them whenever he heard a slight rustle, hoping it would be Nelle there to break him out of the shit hole.

 

**Month Three.**

 

It hadn’t been easy, but he convinced one of the guards to give him a small deck of cards. He didn’t quite know why he was so against giving him the cards at first, really, what could he do with them? Amaze them with some trick so much that they just let him walk out? Well, he supposed he could distract them with the cards when Nelle decided to show up, but who knew when that would be. He appreciated how careful she was being about the whole thing, but he was getting really sick of looking at the three empty walls of his cell along with the empty one across from him.

So he sat on the floor trying to find new ways to shuffle the cards, finding new flashy tricks he could do to distract his victims while he snuck a hand into their pockets. Soon even that became a chore, he would think he was onto something only to realize he was simply recreating a trick invented a long time ago. He began shuffling the deck in a normal fashion by the end of the month. Anything to keep his hands busy while he thought about what kind of hell must be happening out in the world above his cell.

 

**Month Four.**

 

Karmenos didn’t trust people.

He’d learned not to from a very young age, back when he was just a little orphaned Teifling unlucky enough to be born outside of the Acolytes of the Sun. Don’t get him wrong, he didn’t want to be some Acolyte of the Sun, some blind fool throwing his wealth away into the Holy Flame, but it would have been nice to have someone who didn’t look at him like he was a curse upon the earth sent by a God he didn’t even worship.

Those who he did end up trusting always ended up disappointing or leaving him. He tried his damndest to be indispensable to people, but no one wanted a kid who you could pick out in a huge crowd of people to spy for them, or steal for them, so he had to work on his own. He told himself he was happy like that, but at nights he would lie awake wondering what it was like to go back to a home and look at familiar faces who put a little bit of fondness into your being.

He got a little taste of that when the Cult of the Stars took him in, but even then he wasn’t an accepted member of the group. He was different from them, he hadn’t been raised worshipping death and Nihil, he wasn’t a Wood Elf, he was a bright red kid with horns and a tail. Ultimately being taken in didn’t change much for Karmenos, now he was a young charlatan with a little bit of holy in him rather than a young charlatan who would be hard pressed to name most of the Gods worshipped in this damned country.

Maybe that was why he’d taken to Nelle to quickly. He’d laughed a little when he saw the purple Drow attempt to steal from a woman, he saw himself in her. The more time he spent with her, the more the connection grew. She too was an orphan, someone who hadn’t fit in, taken in by the Cult only find they didn’t really belong there either. Maybe that’s why he’d assumed she’d come get him. He knows he would have done it, and the two of them were basically on the same wavelength, weren’t they?

 

**Month Five.**

 

She wasn’t coming.

 

**Month Six.**

 

People were nothing to Karmenos, it should have always been that way. When he was a kid, it was easy. He had no one to care for, or who cared about him. He was alone, and it was easy like that. Even when he did have people, they’d always left him within a few months. It made it easy to classify people as just a thing to be tossed away when he was done with them.

So why did she have to change that. Why did she, someone who should have known as well as he did how much it hurt to be left behind, change that for him only to leave him there to rot. He wanted to hate her for it, but he just couldn’t. She’d changed him for the better Gods damn it, and he fucking hated it. He seethed over it for nearly a week, but then he realized there wasn’t a point. He had to go back to the way things were. He had to let her go, she was just another person, no better or worse than the ones he’d known before he met her.

 

**Month Seven.**

 

It had been easy to pretend it hadn’t affected him at first. Then they moved a Drow into the cell across from him. He refused to look at her, happy to pretend the cell was just as empty as it had been for months down. She’s yelled across from the hall to him, but he was happy to close his eyes and think about conquests of the past, fine food he’d bought with stolen money, noble’s he’d embarrassed publicly, the like.

Later in the month she was moved to another jail. He thinks. He ignores the feeling of regret that blossoms inside of him when he hears the footsteps take her away.

 

**Month Eight.**

 

From the sounds of it, everyone had been moved out of the bottom floor. The floor had never been particularly full, but it had never been empty like this before. After a few days of silence, he called out to a guard and asked what had happened. The guard didn’t answer him, and instead looked upon him with a bit of pity. He hated it, and stopped looking out of his cell, preferring to shuffle his cards mindlessly, thinking of anything other than the little cell, and avoiding the memories of the little Drow who’d ruined him.

 

**Month Nine.**

 

The guards had stopped coming down. Maybe it was because it was just him, but he hated it. The total silence drove him insane, there were not jingling of keys or parts of footsteps. Sometimes there would be a thump from the floor above him, but otherwise it was silent. He was going crazy, and he hated it.

He especially hated it when he saw her again. Her face all sorry, her voice gentle, he fucking hated what his mind was doing to him. He missed her so much, she’d been his best friend for so long, why could he not just forget her? Why did he enjoy this conversation, why did he feed into her words.

Why did he was to believe her so badly.


End file.
